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> EM dashes break things, such as sentences or thoughts Some style guides recommend "space, en dash, space" for this, and I prefer that myself – mainly because
by lxgr 2y ago
> EM dashes break things, such as sentences or thoughts
Some style guides recommend "space, en dash, space" for this, and I prefer that myself – mainly because some software doesn't treat em dashes correctly as word separators for double click selection purposes.
For example, I'm pretty sure that at least some Kindle models would highlight both the word before and after the em dash when selecting one of them, which makes using the dictionary very annoying.
- rahimnathwani 2y agoI grew up in the UK, and have always used space, minus, space. The first keyboard I used was my dad's typewriter, and I don't recall it having any 'dash' other that the minus sign.
- KPGv2 2y agospace, minus, space is on the same level as manually typing two spaces after a period
- lxgr 2y agoHow so? One is the only way to approximate an en or em dash on a typewriter or in a charset that doesn’t have one, the other seems like a workaround of a typesetting bug at best.
- Propelloni 2y ago-, --, --- is, IIRC, how it is done in LaTex and would be exceedingly simple to do on a typewriter. That being said, to break up sentences I use " -- " because I think it looks nicer than "---". I'll go now ;)
- lxgr 2y agoLaTeX is a markup language though, not ASCII art. I can get behind two dashes as a substitute if no en dash is available, but three seems too much and looks like halfway to a horizontal line to me ;)
- rahimnathwani 2y agoUntil ~10 years ago, I used to type two spaces after a period.
- Daneel_ 2y agoI still do, and I maintain that it’s easier to read text with double spaces after periods.
- _emacsomancer_ 2y agoTeX puts more space after periods/fullstops (which is why you're supposed to do special markup or other measures to mark '.' in the middle of sentences which aren't sentence-enders (e.g. like e.g.)). But it's generally smaller than the equivalent of two manual spaces. (A nice thing in (La)TeX is that one could follow the "two spaces after a full-stop" rule, which then has the advantage of being an explicit marking for sentence boundaries (which your editor might be able to navigate; Emacs has a convention of assuming two spaces after a sentence-ending '.'), but then the TeX typesetting will take care of making it look right. I lost the habit of actually doing this, for better or worse, except when flycheck/checkdoc/package-linter.el makes me do it for docstrings.)
- globnomulous 2y agoI used to feel similarly. Now I find the double space a visual distraction that doesn't in any way improve readability. The effect of the double space is, I suspect, a product of the reader's expectations: if you expect it, its absence creates mental work, detracting from readability; if you don't expect it, its presence is what creates mental work.
- asveikau 2y agoI'm still doing it when I am typing at a physical keyboard. Hard habit to break. I learned it so long ago too. You can tell when I've edited something on both a phone and a physical keyboard, based on the inconsistent use of spaces.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
- robin_reala 2y agoen-US style is a single em-dash. en-GB style is a single en-dash with spaces on either side.
- Propelloni 2y agoI was under the impression that you do "-" for hyphen, "--" for En dash, and "---" for Em dash. IIRC, LaTeX (or maybe the editor, it has been some time) even helpfully changes that for you to the correct dash.
- rahimnathwani 2y agoGoogle Docs also does these replacements.
- JadeNB 2y ago> I was under the impression that you do "-" for hyphen, "--" for En dash, and "---" for Em dash. IIRC, LaTeX (or maybe the editor, it has been some time) even helpfully changes that for you to the correct dash. The conversion of '--' to an en dash and '---' to an em dash is done by the TeX compiler, and appears in the rendered file, but I think that most TeX editors don't change the TeX code itself. (This is distinct from XeTeX-based compilers, which can handle non-ASCII Unicode characters like the em dash '—' directly in the source.) (I think that the article's point is that, in some fonts, -- (two hyphens) is literally the (approximate) size of an em dash, not that it is always understood as meaning an em dash. At least in my font, --- (three hyphens) is far too long to literally look like an em dash: --- -- — – (in order, three hyphens, two hyphens, em dash, en dash).)
- Finnucane 2y agoBritish typesetting style is a little different from US style in the way dashes are presented. In the UK, you might see a thin-space--en-dash---thin-space where a US typesetter would use a em-dash. Typewriter style generally follows books style. Since typesetters no longer use an extra space after punctuation, it's vestigial in typing.
- KPGv2 2y ago> Some style guides recommend "space, en dash, space" for this Which one does that? I threw up a little in my mouth and wish to avoid such style guides in the future!
- mmooss 2y agoThe AP Style Manual, a/the leading source for US journalism at least, says <word> <space> <dash> <space> <word> Outside of journalism, usually there is no padding, only, <word> <dash> <word> I'm with you: For searches, the spaces make the words easier to parse. Those rules predate computers, I would guess.
- lxgr 2y ago> <word> <dash> <word> That one I’d usually parse as a hyphen, as in e.g. well-known. “Word space dash space word” is much clearer, in my view. > The AP Style Manual, a/the leading source for US journalism One of the things I can easily get away with by not being a US journalist :)
- stouset 2y agoIt’s quite hard to mistake an em dash for a hyphen in a proportional font. self-fulfilling self—fulfilling One of these looks very, very wrong.
- johnisgood 2y agoI agree, although I still prefer spaces between —.
- mattl 2y agoChicago Manual of Style has no spaces, so there’s some variation at least.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- opello 2y ago> Some style guides recommend "space, en dash, space" for this The last paragraph of the article also addressed the subjective nature of spacing around the em dash: > Spacing around an em dash varies. Most newspapers insert a space before and after the dash, and many popular magazines do the same, but most books and journals omit spacing, closing whatever comes before and after the em dash right up next to it. As far as the selection detail, did you mean that you replace an em dash used like a comma or parenthesis with spaces and an en dash for specific highlight performance issues? Surely the spaces and an em dash would alleviate the selection highlight behavior and not muddy the waters of when to use an em vs. an en dash?
- JadeNB 2y ago> Spacing around an em dash varies. Most newspapers insert a space before and after the dash, and many popular magazines do the same, but most books and journals omit spacing, closing whatever comes before and after the em dash right up next to it. It's funny that they omit to mention the possibility of setting it off with a thin space ' ' or hair space ' ' (those are the thin-space and hair-space Unicode characters, though they show up full width for me), which I thought was preferred typographic practice. (On Googling, maybe the reason that they don't mention it is that I was imagining it; I can't find any evidence for my belief.)
- opello 2y ago> those are the thin-space and hair-space Unicode characters, though they show up full width for me Interestingly, at least in my browser and grabbing the direct link to the comment with curl, show the bytes as 0x20 for both. Perhaps the comment submission handler, or even the browser, collated your more specific U+2009 (thin) and U+200A (hair) spaces into the regular U+0020 space?
- JadeNB 2y ago> Interestingly, at least in my browser and grabbing the direct link to the comment with curl, show the bytes as 0x20 for both. Perhaps the comment submission handler, or even the browser, collated your more specific U+2009 (thin) and U+200A (hair) spaces into the regular U+0020 space? Probably! I think HN strips out emoji; maybe it just takes the safest approach and strips out all non-white-listed Unicode.
- krick 2y agoIt's actually only your post that made me realize people don't normally put spaces around em dash. In French, Russian and a bunch of other languages proper typesetting is to use em dash as a standard dash character, and you always put spaces around them. So I did it in English as well, for many years now. (I also now looked up and found out that in Spanish, apparently, you are supposed to put space only on one side of the dash, when used as a direct speech separator.)
- mmooss 2y agoWhat is a "standard dash character"? There is no such thing in English; only hyphen, EN dash, EM dash (and some odds and ends).
- rmunn 2y agoI also put spaces around em dashes. It looks wrong—subtly wrong—to me to have the words glued together around the dash. It looks right — completely right — to me to have the dash standing on its own, as if it was a word in its own right.
- lashloch 2y agoFunny—I'm the exact opposite. The extra spaces distract my eyes. To each their own! :)
- rmunn 2y agoTo each their own: fully agreed, even though our tastes differ. I will mention one advantage of the spaces-around-dashes method: word wrap with default settings will break on the spaces around the dashes so that the entire word one, dash, word two combo doesn't end up pulled onto the next line as a whole unit. Whereas the advantage of the no-spaces method that you prefer is that word wrap will pull the entire word one, dash, word two combo onto the next line as a whole unit. Why yes, I did list the opposite behavior as an advantage of each. Because that, too, is up to individual preference. :-)
- 2y ago
- cyrillite 2y agoI have been doing this for purely aesthetic reasons my whole life. Style guides be damned, I hate connected em dashes.
- lxgr 2y agoThe good thing about style guides is that they’re guides, not laws :) That’s one thing I really like about English: There’s no central authority decreeing what’s right and what’s wrong top down, and it feels like there is some room for individual preferences and experimentation. Very refreshing, compared to e.g. German, which has more than one semi-official authority gate keeping “correctness” in speech and writing.
- mmooss 2y agoIn fairness, especially in the Anglo-Saxon dominated world post-WWII, English was under no threat to be swamped by German or French words.